Stone Carving Taster - Carve a Sycamore Seed in Portland Stone

A sculptor who tracks the sun in stone teaches you to carve a falling seed

New Brewery Arts' longest-serving tutor, sculptor Ann-Margreth Bohl, has taught stone carving here for nineteen years, but her own sculpture runs to a different scale entirely. Her piece Holocene, shown at the 2018 Royal Horticultural Society Show Garden at Chatsworth House, was carved from sandstone blocks pre-cut so their shadows would fall in a precise pattern at a set moment during the show, working like a modern sundial. In this one-day taster in the Chisel Studio, she brings that same precision down to a single sycamore seed, carved in low relief from Portland stone, the fine white limestone Christopher Wren chose for St Paul's Cathedral.

You trace a prepared drawing of the seed onto a pre-cut stone panel, then work through the sequence used in any relief carving: outlining the silhouette with a pointed chisel, cutting back the background to open up depth, and finishing with flat chisels, rasps and rifflers. Bohl trained as a paediatric nurse in Germany before turning to sculpture, and still describes her work as an attempt to hold a moment still. All tools, materials and FFP3 dust masks are provided, no carving experience is needed, and the workshop is for over-18s only.

Saturday 24 October 2026 · New Brewery Arts, Brewery Court, Cirencester, Gloucestershire GL7 1JH · 10am–4pm